Turkish college students' willingness to communicate in English as a foreign language

Abstract

English, which is defined as an international language, is used by more than one and a half billion people (Strevens, 1992) as a first, second, or foreign language for communication purposes.Consequently, the purpose of teaching English has shifted from the mastery of structure to the ability to use the language for communicative purposes.Thus, the issues of whether learners would communicate in English when they had the chance and what would affect their willingness to communicate gain importance.Recently, a "Willingness to Communicate" (WTC) model was developed by McIntyre et al. (1998) to explain and predict second language communication.The objective of the present study was to examine whether college students who were learning English as a foreign language in the Turkish context were willing to communicate when they had an opportunity and whether the WTC model explained the relations among social-psychological, linguistic and communication variables in this context.The present study was a hybrid design that combined both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis procedures.First, a questionnaire was administered to 356 randomly selected college students in Turkey.Then, interviews were conducted with 15 randomly selected students who had already answered the iii questionnaire.The Structural Equation Model (SEM) analysis was conducted to examine the interrelations among students' willingness to communicate in English, their language learning motivation, communication anxiety, perceived communication competence, attitude toward the international community, and personality.Qualitative interviews were utilized to extend and elaborate these quantitative results.The results revealed that students were somewhat willing to communicate in English, were moderately motivated to learn English, had a positive attitude toward the international community, had low communication anxiety, perceived themselves somewhat competent to communicate in English, and were slightly extraverted.These students' willingness to communicate was found to be directly related to their attitude toward the international community and their perceived linguistic self-confidence.Students' motivation to learn English and their personality in terms of being an introvert or extrovert were found to be indirectly related to their willingness to communicate through linguistic self-confidence.Finally, their attitude toward the international community was correlated with their personality.

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